


Carven Gods

by Rotpeach



Category: Boyfriend to Death (Visual Novel)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Edo Japan, Cannibalism, Japanese Mythology & Folklore, Naga, Other, Ritual Sex, autocannibalism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-07
Updated: 2016-12-07
Packaged: 2018-09-07 01:36:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8777968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rotpeach/pseuds/Rotpeach
Summary: You gave yourself to the serpent god willingly, but that doesn't mean you don't have regrets.Sequel to In the Cicada's Cry.





	

**Author's Note:**

> i actually write a lot of btd stuff that i never post because its super self-indulgent and i get embarrassed writing my own kinks  
> but people seemed to like the predecessor to this so im just gonna  
> leave this here  
> and  
> show myself out

* * *

The arrival of spring is heralded by the profusion of cherry blossoms blooming and dying, the shrine grounds littered with pale pink flower petals.

“What a sight,” sighs the traveling monk passing by your shrine, his hands tucked into his sleeves. “Were the flowers this beautiful last year?”

You pointedly avoid his gaze, sweeping flowers and leaves off of the stone walkway and into the grass. “Why compare them? Every spring is beautiful,” you say. You wonder if your words sound as hollow to him as they do to your own ears now that there is no beauty to be found for you in the world beneath the holy mountain.

“That’s true. This one just seems particularly nice.” He stands atop the stone steps and gazes into the valley, where burnt, naked trees stretch skyward with splintering branches like desperately reaching hands. “There was a village there once, wasn’t there?” he asks.

You follow his gaze. “Ah. I suppose there was.”

“What happened to it?”

(In the night, ghosts stagger up the shrine steps and scratch at the doors with their blackened fingers, faces melting and body consumed by flames even now. They speak in harsh whispers and pained groans as they drift through the walls and lay cold, wispy hands upon you, asking, _“How could you?”_

You look back at them with hatred as you throw off your robes, showing them the markings on your skin, curling around your legs and your torso and wrapping around your neck in a snakeskin pattern, discoloration upon your flesh like a tattoo.

You look into their empty eyes and you ask them the same thing.)

“I don’t know,” you tell the monk, eyes downcast. “I was in the capital at the time.”

“The capital,” he muses. “That must’ve been nice. I’ve never had the chance to go.”

“It was for business,” you say stiffly, perturbed by how talkative he is. He’s still standing on the steps with his back to you, staring at the charred earth down below. You’re starting to wonder why he felt the need to come all the way up to the shrine when he was supposedly just passing through. “The crown prince’s daughter was sick and no one could figure out what was wrong.”

“Oh? So could you figure it out?”

You watch him warily. “A nue,” you say. “A monster hiding in the clouds above the palace. Once I divined the cause, the emperor sent a few archers and took care of the problem.”

“A monster?” he repeats, giving a quiet laugh. “I’ve always thought that was strange, you know. How do we decide what’s a god and what’s a monster? Those kinds of creatures really aren’t all that different from one another. Some are just a little more interested in human matters.”

“I think that’s all it takes,” you tell him. “When people ask for help, they’re going to respect whatever answers.”

“Even things as awful as the one that gave you that scar?”

You freeze, clutching the broom in a white-knuckle grip. The monk slowly turns to face you, a smile stretched wide across his face. His eyes are a startling shade of yellow and his gaze is piercing, like he can see right through you.

“Mountain spirits are old,” he says, “but they’re an awful lot like bad children. They don’t know why humans feel the things they do, and they don’t care to.”

You swallow nervously, paralyzed with confusion and fear as he draws closer. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” you say, your voice shaking.

“Oh,” he sighs, shaking his head in pity, “I’d pick your words a little more carefully. He can probably hear you.”

“What are you?”

He just smiles. “Did it feel good when you burned the village down?”

You're overcome with anger, gripping the collar of his robes in your fist and hissing, “You have no idea what happened. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Of course I understand. We’re not that different,” he says patiently, his fingers gently touching your wrist.

You push him away like he burned you and clutch your hand to your chest. You feel a warm wind ruffle your clothes, feeling like hands pushing you, sounding like words in your ear, smelling like the earth.

“Seems you’re being called,” he says, tucking his hands back into his sleeves as he looks into the distance towards the mountains. “You’d better go before you make him mad. Or maybe it’s too late.” He grins. “Tell him I said hello.”

The yellow-eyed man bows his head, smirking like he knows something you don’t, and then he starts down the shrine steps and disappears into the valley.

You are certain that he is not a monk.

*

A sense of dread settles over your shoulders as you journey back up the mountain trail. It’s unnervingly silent, the shuffling of foxes through the underbrush and the cries of birds strangely absent. You reach the shrine at nightfall, led by ghostly blue flames that flicker inside the stone lanterns beside it.

Sano is waiting for you, dressed in a light yukata decorated with waves and water lilies. You leave some distance between you and don’t quite meet his eyes.

“You’ve been away for a long time,” he says evenly, but there is an edge to his words. A warning, maybe.

(A threat to explain yourself.)

“The emperor summoned me to Edo,” you explain.

“Look me in the eye when you speak to me.”

You lift your gaze hesitantly and find him frowning, quiet anger boiling beneath a cold facade.

“I know you went to Edo,” he says, “but you returned days ago. You’ve had plenty of time to return here, but you’ve stayed away because of…” He pauses, and you shiver at the intensity in his eyes as he looks down at you. “Guilt.”

“I don’t feel guilty,” you protest.

“No? Then what’s kept you from sleep every night since the village was punished?”

( _Punished,_ he says, rather than _reduced to ash._ As though it was just and fair.)

“You asked me to make them suffer,” he murmurs. “You begged me. And now you’re regretting it.”

“I’m not,” you insist. “They deserved it.”

“Did they?”

(And deep in the night, as you squeeze your eyes shut and try to ignore the cold wind they bring with them, you feel her small hand pulling at your sleeve. You recall her face the day you left, her appreciative smile as she told you, “Mommy said that nothing bad will happen to us anymore because you’re going to fix it,” and she had no idea, she couldn’t have known. It was not her fault.

You hear her crying and smell her burning alive.)

“I know you've had doubts,” Sano says. “Your eyes are bloodshot and your complexion is poor. You haven't been sleeping well.”

“How could I?” you ask hoarsely. “I was angry and upset and I felt betrayed, and I wanted to hurt them. But when it was over, I….” You take a deep breath.

“What’s done is done. I answered your prayers. Some would say your lingering guilt is a testament to your virtue, persisting even after I’ve laid claim to your soul.” He regards you coolly. “I would call it weakness.”

(Mountain spirits do not know why humans feel the way they do, nor do they care to, you were told just recently.

God and monster are two different words for the same beast.)

“You’re thinking about what he told you, aren’t you?”

You swallow nervously, asking, “Who was he?”

Sano’s eyes narrow. “Come here,” he says with absolute authority. When you’re within arm’s reach, he cups your cheek with his hand and smooths his thumb over your lips. The gesture holds no affection, only a sense of ownership. “I’m beginning to think you misunderstood what exactly you gave to me the day you offered yourself in exchange for vengeance.”

“I gave you everything,” you say.

The whites of his eyes begin to darken. “Not everything.”

Sano nearly tears your clothes as he violently pulls them off of your body, leaving you naked and shivering before him. The snakeskin etched into your flesh glows a faint, ghostly blue. “There were some things I let you keep,” he says, eyes fixed on the markings as he unties his obi and lets his yukata pool on the ground beneath him. White scales rise up along his legs as his body begins to change. “And that was a mistake.”

He pulls you closer, making you straddle his tail, and you inhale shakily at the sensation of his cold scales against the sensitive, warm flesh where your legs meet. “When I receive a sacrifice, I sever their earthly connections,” he tells you. “Death does this easily, but for some, that isn’t necessary.” He traces the outline of the snakeskin imprinted on the front of your body with his fingertips, touch light and teasing. “Your sense of wonder. Your capacity for love. Your ability to see beauty in the world and in your fellow humans. I took all of these things from you. Beyond the grounds of my shrine, you can’t ever feel any of them.”

You arch your back involuntarily when he slides his hands down your sides.

“But I left you your simplest, purest feelings. I believed you deserved that small mercy.” His hands slide down to your hips and he eases you up higher. Your breath catches in your throat when you feel engorged flesh hardening beneath you, prodding at you skin in two separate places. You’re startled to see his gaze soften as he says, “But I think that’s only caused you to suffer needlessly.”

Sano moves his hips slightly, rubbing against you, and you wrap your arms around his neck to keep yourself steady on top of him. “Wh-what are you doing?” you stammer.

“Doing what I should have done to begin with,” he mutters, his face flushed and his voice deepening with arousal. “I want the emotions I so generously let you keep, but I can’t take them by force. You need to offer yourself to me again.”

“What if I still want them?” you ask.

He grips your rear firmly and grinds up into you, harder this time, and you moan, back arching as you push yourself against his chest. “Then I will try to change your mind until you relinquish them willingly,” he says, breathing labored.

“That hardly seems fair.”

Sano smiles bitterly. “Even among monsters, I’m particularly selfish,” he says. “I’m afraid it’s too late for you to begin having second thoughts.”

You pull yourself back far enough to look at him, taking his face in your hands. “You are not a monster,” you whisper. “You are a god to me.”

(What answers when one cries out for help is no longer a monster, no matter its demands, no matter its cruelty, because if it has the compassion to listen once, it may do so again.

That is why humans worship.)

Sano crushes your lips with his, swallowing your startled gasp as he begins to slowly ease one of his cocks inside of you, the other pressing hot and hard against your lower back. Your nails rake down his back as you sink down onto him, legs straining and trembling.

His lips slide to the corner of your mouth and he nips and bites his way to your ear, whispering, “Offer yourself to me,” demanding, but also begging.

You shudder, feeling his hot breath as he buries his face in the crook of your neck, and you tell him you belong to him, that he can take everything, that you want him to.

You wonder if the ghosts are out there in the dark, watching, too afraid to come forward, disgusted by the shrine caretaker and the serpent god as you writhe against him.

The coils of Sano’s tail writhe and slide over one another beneath you as his fangs sink into your neck, and your breath catches at the pain. You feel the same agony as you did the first time he did this, radiating through your entire body and traveling all the way down to your toes. The markings on your skin glow brighter.

He pulls his teeth out of your flesh and licks at the blood bubbling to the surface. “Your joy, your sorrow, your guilt,” he murmurs. “You’ll never feel them in the world beyond this shrine. You must come back to me.”

He places a hand on your chest to push you back far enough to dig his nails into your stomach. You whimper when he tears you open, startled to find that your body doesn’t jerk back reflexively. The pain is nearly blinding and you squirm and twist in his lap, but you find yourself leaning into his intrusive touch, your hips moving with him.

You moan his name as he suckles on the bloody bite mark in your throat. You feel his fingers moving inside of your body and see them bulging beneath your skin as they slide over your rib cage. Your entrails spill into your lap, blood sliding over your legs and down his scales.

When he retracts his hand, you see him clutching a fistful of your intestines, red and sickly yellow. He takes a bite, his teeth sinking into the soft tissue and blood running down his chin, and then he tilts your chin and kisses you. The chunk of metallic and heady-tasting viscera is pressed between your tongues. Sano moves his hand to the back of your neck, his mouth moving against yours around the organ.

His other hand grasps your hip to hold you still as he drills his cock into you, thrusts faster than before, and you can feel yourself quickly approaching climax. You break the kiss, the lump of your intestines falling from your mouth as you rest your head against Sano’s chest, struggling to breathe, and he makes you ride him harder. You clutch his shoulders, your body trembling as you’re overcome by your orgasm. He fucks you through it without mercy, his tail shifting restlessly beneath you, until he cums, his grip on your body becoming bruising as his hips stutter and you feel him filling you.

You slump against him and try to catch your breath, feeling cold and empty, like something has been ripped away from you, but Sano's arms wrap around you, and the worry rippling through you slowly fades away.

*

At sunrise, you are dressed again and ready to return to the world beneath the mountain. Sano stands just within the torii gates to see you off.

“I can see and hear you, you know,” he tells you. “No matter how far away you are. I’ve watched you scream and struggle to find sleep.”

You give a sheepish smile, embarrassed. “Ah. I wondered if you could see that.”

“Of course. But I couldn’t figure out why.”

You look up at him, brows furrowed. “What do you mean? It was the villagers. They kept coming back and asking me why I did it, why I killed them—!”

Sano raises a brow. “You were alone.”

“But the ghosts…they were….”

He shakes his head. Reaching into the sleeve of his yukata, he produces a soft pink peach and holds it out to you. “A peach tree started to grow near the sacrificial altar shortly after you first came here,” he explains. “Probably because you brought some with you that time. I just left them there, and it seems one of the seeds began to grow.”

There isn’t a faint stirring within you at the sight of the fruit, not a pain in your heart or even a pang of sadness. But when you reach out to take it from him, your arm beneath the torii gate, tears begin streaming down your cheeks.

Sano looks at you with pity. “Return home,” he says. “Sleep well tonight.”

You eat the peach on your way down the mountain, and by the time you’re back at your shrine, there’s only a pit left. You decide to plant it at the edge of the shrine grounds, at the top of the steps overlooking the valley. You receive no joy for this action, no relief, but the wind blows and a sense of closure washes over you.

(Your god—your monster—is a capricious one, but it is moments like these that erase any lingering traces of regret from your heart.)

**Author's Note:**

> the carven gods are long gone  
> and dead leaves gather  
> on the temple porch  
> \--basho


End file.
